Comfort and Joy, Page 2

  "Yeah," Ford said, "and it's a good thing too, don't you think?" He ran a hand through his hair, taking a deep breath. "Do we have condoms?"

  "You know we do."

  Laughing softly, Ford stepped past a suitcase. Gray eyes on Dan. They were facing each other, Dan touching fingertips to Ford's shoulders, tracing the full curves of his chest, the flatness of his abdomen, down to the cool buckle of his belt.

  Ford cradled himself against Dan's chest, and for a long time lay there drowsing. He started awake. Stretching, he leaned over Dan. "If I don't turn on this light, I'll fall asleep."

  "I bet that restaurant is closed by now."

  "It's not that late," Ford said, "it just feels that way."

  Reluctant to untangle their limbs, they lay quietly until Ford said, "I need to call the hospital." Dan could feel his search for words. Pulling Dan close, Ford continued, "We did the right thing this year. About Christmas."

  "I think so, too."

  The shower was good. As he toweled himself dry, he could hear Ford discussing medication with his friend Russell Cohen. A crisp conversation about incisions and drainage. Tomorrow the child would have a second session of computed tomography to determine the size of the swelling somewhere in the head. Ford hung up the receiver. "I'm glad Cohen's the on-call. The kid's doing okay. Not great, at the moment. But okay." Then, moving away from the phone, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be talking about it."

  "Why not? I don't mind."

  "That's all my dad ever did with Mom. Review cases." Ford found the black jeans and put them on, but simply held the sweatshirt in his hand. "Did you bring my silk sweater?"

  This had been a gift from Dan. Ford slipped the pale blue sweater over his bare skin. "What did you do with the cats?"

  "Took them to board at the vet."

  Ford sat down to tie his sneakers. "I don't see why you couldn't just leave some food out."

  Had it not been for these same cats, Dan might have moved into Ford's house six months sooner, or so Ford always claimed. "They'll be safer at the vet."

  "How much does that cost?" Ford asked, finding his wallet.

  "Not much." A slight edge to his tone. "I can afford it."

  Silence. Ford, coming up behind, put his arms around Dan and said, in his ear, "I can afford it too. That's not what I meant."

  The warmth of the body surrounding Dan reminded him that he was, by agreement, safe. "Ten bucks a night," Dan said. "They stay in the same cage."

  The lone waitress scanned the empty rows of tables, inviting them to choose their own vantage. Ford selected a table by the window, where wind pressed against the broad glass pane, whipping real and reflected treetops. Below, in the gulf of highway, traffic moved in slow ribbons. "We must be close to Raleigh," Dan said.

  "Right outside." Ford sat back, rubbing his stomach. "How long does it take to get to your mom's from here?"

  "Two hours. Something like that." Dan opened his menu.

  "We can sleep late."

  Dan hardly heard this. The thought of what lay two hours away struck him cold. Tomorrow we will drive to my mother's house. Tomorrow. Dan reached for distractions and found his water glass.

  Ford said, "One of the guys on the ward was talking about you today."

  "Was he?" Dan asked.

  "The nurses took him to hear you sing. In the Christmas concert. He liked it a lot."

  Dan said, "I thought I sounded pretty bad," but was pleased nevertheless.

  "The nurses said you sounded good. They went on and on about it. Made me feel terrible, for not getting there."

  "You couldn't help it."

  "That's where I first saw you. Way back when I was a senior medical student. You were singing, 'God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.' I had never heard anything like you. It was one of the saddest sounds I ever heard. You got under my skin." This with a look of deep brooding. Something beneath attempting to surface. "I think I knew something about you that day."

  "What?"

  "Something about where you came from. What you could do. So I remembered you."

  Something about where you came from. The phrase echoed as the waitress, Marlene, presented supper.

  During the ride in the elevator, Ford leaned against Dan and closed his eyes. Dan led him through the empty corridor by the hand, fishing the key from Ford's pocket. Ford stumbled dramatically to the bed and sprawled across it. Ford's need for sleep had long been a joke between them. He got little rest at the hospital, even when he was called upon to remain there for thirty-six or forty-eight-hour shifts; consequently, he had no time for anything else when he was at home. Dan sat quietly beside Ford, watching, hearing the change in Ford's breathing that indicated he would soon be asleep. Dan unlaced Ford's shoes, and Ford stirred, murmuring. Dan undressed him with practiced gestures. Dan read for a while, sitting in one of the chairs. When Ford's breath fell and rose in waves, Dan lay down beside him.

  In the small hours of morning, waking out of sound sleep, Dan heard Ford talking in low tones on the telephone. Ford was speaking to Russell again. His voice, cool and crisp, belied his fatigue. The child had lost a good deal of blood. Dan couldn't hear all that was being said, but for some reason he had a feeling this boy had hemophilia, too, and that this was a cause of Ford's worry.

  "Is everything all right?"

  "The kid's having a bad night." Ford's weight settled against Dan's back. "But Russell says he'll make it."

  Closing his eyes, Dan returned to shadowland and let Ford's warmth and nearness lull him into sleep again. Through dawn and after, they lay drowsy, basking in the unaccustomed peace, having no alarm to answer. Mornings to lie abed had been scarce. Drifting in and out of dreaming, Dan was sometimes certain he wandered in Ford's house, where the sick boy cried nearby, in a room Dan had never seen and could not find, even though he heard the child clearly; in the dream Dan himself was bleeding and needed to take his medicine, but Ford had already departed for the hospital....

  At other moments he was aware of Ford's heavy leg flung across his own, beneath sheets of harsh texture. The comfortable thigh and fleshly warmth drew Dan nearer consciousness, but he lay quiet within the soft blankets, studying the pattern of acoustical tile in the ceiling. Ford's heavy sleep weighed like a stone in the bed beside him, the young man sprawled across pillows, hair tangled over his brow, bare dark nipple peering above the sheet's edge.

  Soon Dan returned to the territory of the dream.

  This time, because Dan himself was closer to waking, the dream image was more vivid. In Ford's house, Dan waited in the kitchen just after dawn and the boy was crying. His clear voice sounded a note of hollow cold and loneliness, a thread of vibration, now and then broken by soft sobs. On the kitchen counter lay the apparatus of the hemophiliac, the vials of dissolving medication, syringes, alcohol prep pads, butterfly needles, a tourniquet—was the medication for the boy, or for Dan?

  As the sobbing continued, Dan searched the house, trying to find the boy by the sound of his voice. For a while he suspected it was his brother Grove; then he was certain it was Ford; then he became convinced it was he himself, he was crying somewhere, a smaller, younger, lesser Danny, and Dan the Elder had to find him. But the boy was always crying from some farther room. So Dan wandered.

  He woke finally to the tightening of large arms around his waist, to the press of a familiar heat at his back, Ford's breathing torso moving against him and the sleepy voice murmuring in his ear. Saying no words, only the soft, slow pressure of Ford's thighs against Dan's back, till Dan turned.

  When they were dressed, they bought breakfast at the same table in the same restaurant as the night before. "Did you pack your medicine?" Ford asked. "I looked for it in the suitcase but I couldn't find it."

  "I have it in a separate case, in the closet. Why?"

  "Just making sure," Ford said.

  He had already found time to call the hospital again, a conversation he had shielded from Dan, though Dan knew it had taken place. The sick boy had lived
through the night.

  Traveling east of Raleigh in the rented car, through flat farm country studded with paint-peeling farmhouses and winter-gaunt pine forests, Ford had the feeling it was Savannah, Georgia, that lay at the end of this journey and not the Wickham, North Carolina, of Dan's family. There was, in the flatness of the land and the poverty of the countryside, much to remind him of the territories of his own boyhood. Overhead blazed a sky white and bare as any winter sky Ford had seen, the morning sun a searing single eye into which the automobile plunged headlong. Along the roadside, beyond the bland fast-food-tainted suburbs of the Raleigh beltway, stood evidence of the lost commerce of other generations—the small wood-frame crossroads stores advertising Pepsicola; the ubiquitous, rusted Quaker State motor oil signs nearly lost behind brown weeds; wooden tobacco-curing barns, rotten and leaning over the trim, metallic bulk-curers that had replaced them. A small farm town hugged every curve of the road, streetlights bedecked in tattered Christmas decorations, streets for the most part empty of traffic. The quiet country spoke more to Ford of bleakness than of peace, so that, as he steered the car deeper into the eastern forest, he kept watch on Dan.

  He and Dan had enjoyed relatively few such mornings with only one another for company, without the pressure of Ford's being on call at the hospital or Dan's being late coming home. Dan's face, a curious amalgam of homeliness and handsomeness, had a clarity in this whitewashed light that reminded Ford of their first morning, Dan asleep in Ford's east-facing bedroom, Ford studying him, trying to fathom this strange attractor.

  It was the sound of his voice that had stopped Ford in the first-floor lobby of Grady Memorial Hospital, the eerie minor-key vibrato, pure and clean, a cappella, tingling the skin at the back of his neck. Ford, then a fourth-year medical student, was only dimly aware that the hospital sponsored a Christmas concert, but here it was, spilling over from the lobby to surround the information desk and congest the elevator court. Curt Robbins, the resident who was in charge of Ford for that month, cursed the traffic and the delay for the elevator, but Ford moved away from him into the fringes of the crowd, feeling the silence around him as the song hovered in the room. The voice rang on the tile walls and terrazzo floor. The man who was singing stood on a raised dais, nearly blocked from sight by a structural column. He was an odd, tall man, angular, with a childlike face, a high, clear brow, dark hair, and a full, soft mouth. His face was cleanly planed, his jaw all sere lines. At first Ford thought him homely, but after listening for a while he could no longer be sure.

  The song kept him there. In the midst of the decorated lobby, trimmed in potted poinsettias, the familiar carol belied the joyous season and mocked, gently, the attempt at gaiety through evergreen and velvet decorations. This man's song was about the sadness of Christmas, and the singer, as far as Ford could tell, was aware of it, was in fact filling the spacious room and all its occupants with the certainty of it. Tidings of comfort and joy. Ford was mesmerized.

  The song ended, and the singer received his applause. It seemed to Ford that those who had listened to the true nature of the altered melody applauded, as he did, with vigor surpassing the usual polite appreciation. He watched the man, the slim figure and odd face, descend and vanish quietly into a knot of friends. For a few more moments he watched, before shaking his head clear of the echo of the voice and song. Then he and Curt

  Robbins, who had listened as rapt as Ford, returned to their duties. But as the elevator opened, Ford spied a stray concert program on the floor. He lifted the bright green-and-red Xerox, reading the names of the singers, the bell ringers from Coral Baptist Church, and Amanda Zed, the operatically trained business office representative who sang "O Holy Night" every year.

  The name of the other singer was Dan Crell, and he worked in administration. Ford folded the paper and tucked it into his pocket with his patient care notes. In the elevator he said to Curt, "Christmas sucks, anyway."

  Later that same evening, in the apartment he shared with his dog, Hammond, and a friend named Allen Greenfield, he found the program mixed in among the scribbled SMA-18 results for one of his admits. The card on which he had scribbled the lab values belonged to a child who was in the terminal phase of leukemia, and Ford was expected to present this patient during tomorrow's morning conference. The concert program, lost in this chaos, seemed out of place. Laying the notes aside, he unfolded the paper and read the name again.

  He hummed a few notes of the carol idly and thinly, with noise from the refrigerator as his only accompaniment. He tossed the program into the trash along with the rest of the paper to be purged from his pockets. The song would not leave his mind, was by now almost maddening, for it had stuck in his head and replayed itself all day.

  Months later, Ford moved into a house on Clifton Heights, a pretty brick bungalow with a deep yard stretching back to a patch of woods and a mostly dry creek bed. Here he lived, alone, with his dog. He had bought the house using income from a trust established for him by his grandfather. His ownership of the house, combined with his departure from roommates in general and Allen Greenfield in particular, had made Ford aware that he was at an important juncture in his life. He had reached his late twenties, and his parents reminded him regularly that he ought to be thinking about marriage. His parents were certain to continue their lectures on the subject, assuming their harangues to be for his own good. But Ford imagined himself in marriage only with difficulty.

  Ford had lately begun to worry at the number of Allen Greenfields in his life. He had lived with Allen for only a few months. During the beginning of their rooming together, they had made love twice, in Ford's bedroom, on the Sunday afternoons of succeeding weeks, without speaking of the event before, during, or after. These sessions took on a kind of frenzy and violence, the memory of which haunted Ford far beyond the moments of climax. Ford had returned to the apartment from his Sunday morning workout, his body flush from exercise, and Allen followed him into his bedroom, where they talked. Allen had appeared fascinated with the details of Ford's workout. He admired Ford's brawny body, and Ford had offered particular brawn for further admiration. Silence had settled over them both. Ford sensed the tentativeness of Allen's seduction and responded, at the crucial moment. Stripping in front of Allen. Standing close. Finally telling Allen what to do, how to do it, by gripping the smaller man's head with his hand, easing him to his knees. Their two bodies had tossed violently on Ford's big bed, and when they were finished, Ford stepped immediately into the shower.

  But on the third Sunday, Ford returned home from his workout to find Allen's door closed, Allen asleep or feigning sleep.

  When Ford's father's attorneys arranged the down payment on the Clifton Heights house, the thought of moving away from Allen relieved Ford. The two men never discussed the sex, though sometimes Ford would find Allen's eyes on him, momentarily devouring, as he passed from bedroom to shower. In those moments, Ford knew, he might have forced the issue. Feeling Allen's guilty admiration. But he refused.

  The last month found Ford busy with the closing of the house and the details of the trust, with his parents and their attorneys visiting Atlanta from Savannah to obtain signatures on the necessary deeds, loan papers, and documents. With the rigors of his first year in the residency program closing in on him, Ford barely spoke to Allen at all.

  Because admiration had always flowed to him from others, he never before felt himself responsible for any of its by-products. One day, as he wrestled with an older boy, Scott Elliott, in the shower stall at Savannah's Country

  Day School, Scott's sudden arousal led to a kind of mutual fumbling during which Scott came, rapturously, on Ford's thigh. Ford himself felt curiously detached. What he remembered afterward was the taste of power he had over the older boy. This seemed only natural, since Ford was the larger of the two, and yet the fact that Scott was older made the whole incident more significant. When the scene with Scott recurred intermittently, Ford began to take this homage as his due.

 
The fact that he was physically freer with Scott than with any of the girls he dated never occurred to him. That thought only came later, when he actually made love to Susan Warmer in his dormitory room at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He had met her through a student Methodist organization, and she submitted herself to him some months later, after reading to him from the Bible and asking him to pray with her. Following the sweetest, gentlest of prayers, they made out on Ford's plaid bedspread, and she sighed and gave up the ghost, his hand sliding in and out of her clothes. Susan's religion had not stunted her physical development, nor had it dampened her sense of experimentation. But her expectation was that her mere yielding was enough. Ford had grown accustomed to the fervor with which his boys admired him, and Susan's praise of his broad shoulders and the size of his biceps did not strike quite the same chord.

  Soon afterward, in the gymnasium, when a slim, handsome blond named Tucker lingered in the shower to watch Ford following a workout, Ford took the boy to that same dorm room, and they acted out a scene which was more to Ford's liking. Tucker adored that body which had awed him in the gymnasium, and Ford basked in the radiance of Tucker's lust, answering it with his own, leaning back on the bed and letting Tucker drink, the two boys rolling around on that same plaid bedspread, reducing the room to chaos corner by corner. Following Tucker's departure the normally tidy room was a shambles, while after Ford and Susan had restored their clothing they might have served tea on the premises immediately.

  But Tucker he saw no more than twice, while he dated Susan on and off for more than a year. Their lovemaking did improve, but with Susan he never entered into that territory of adrenaline and fever. Because he understood, instinctively, that this failure was not Susan's but had to do with him, he never spoke about the subject. As far as he was concerned, he was perfectly comfortable seeing Susan now and then, and might have gone on dating her far beyond the time during which they courted. But near the end of a year, Ford realized Susan might expect something more from him in the future. After that he became conscious that he was distancing himself from her, and soon they agreed to stop seeing each other altogether.